Freedom Incorporated: Anticommunism and Philippine Independence in the Age of Decolonization

By Colleen Woods

Freedom Incorporated demonstrates how anticommunist political projects were critical to the United States' expanding imperial power in the age of decolonization, and how anticommunism was essential to the growing global economy of imperial violence in the Cold War era.

In this broad historical account, Colleen Woods demonstrates how, in the mid-twentieth century Philippines, US policymakers and Filipino elites promoted the islands as a model colony. In the wake of World War II, as the decolonization movement strengthened, those same political actors pivoted and, after Philippine independence in 1946, lauded the archipelago as a successful postcolonial democracy. Officials at Malacañang Palace and the White House touted the 1946 signing of the liberating Treaty of Manila as a testament to the US commitment to the liberation of colonized people and celebrated it under the moniker of Philippine–American Friendship Day. Despite elite propaganda, from the early 1930s to late 1950s, radical movements in the Philippines highlighted US hegemony over the new Republic of the Philippines and, in so doing, threatened American efforts to separate the US from sordid histories of empire, imperialism, and the colonial racial order.

Woods finds that in order to justify US intervention in an ostensibly independent Philippine nation, anticommunist Filipinos and their American allies transformed local political struggles in the Philippines into sites of resistance against global communist revolution. By linking political struggles over local resources, like the Hukbalahap Rebellion in central Luzon, to a war against communism, American and Filipino anticommunists legitimized the use of violence as a means to capture and contain alternative forms of political, economic, and social organization. Placing the post-World War II history of anticommunism in the Philippines within a larger imperial framework, in Freedom Incorporated Woods illustrates how American and Filipino intelligence agents, military officials, paramilitaries, state bureaucrats, academics, and entrepreneurs mobilized anticommunist politics to contain challenges to elite rule in the Philippines.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781501749148

Book preview

Freedom Incorporated

Anticommunism and Philippine Independence in the Age of Decolonization

Colleen Woods

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1. An Amazing Record of Red Plotting

2. State Violence and the Problem of Political Legitimacy

3. The Anticommunist International

4. Efficient, Honest, and Democratic

5. A Dirty, Half-Hidden War

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Abbreviations

Introduction

A Decolonized Empire

On July 4, 1946, in Manila’s Luneta Park, a crowd of thousands gathered to witness the end of nearly a half century of U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines. Neither the sudden onset of a tropical rainstorm nor the absence of U.S. president Harry S. Truman—who would relinquish U.S. sovereignty over the territory and people of the Philippines from Washington, DC—would dampen the day’s ceremonies.¹ Luneta Park was bordered by thoroughfares named for George Dewey, the lionized hero of the Spanish-American War, and William Howard Taft, the first civilian governor of the U.S. colonial state, showing how deeply U.S. colonization had marked Manila’s built environment.² The event’s main stage, however, was placed on a site that, in the nineteenth century, Spanish imperial authorities used to repress its critics.³ As the U.S. press reported, a flagpole erected where Spanish imperial authorities in 1896 executed Jose Rizal, the famous martyr of the Philippines fight for freedom, was the focal point of the ceremony.⁴ As a U.S. Army band played The Star-Spangled Banner, Paul V. McNutt, the last U.S. high commissioner, lowered the American flag while Philippine president Manuel Roxas raised the red, white, blue, and yellow flag of the Philippines over the Rizal monument.

The monument to Rizal had been constructed in 1908–1913 by a U.S. colonial state eager to cast the national hero in a starring role in the Philippines’ developing nationalism, a process that would reach its end point thanks to U.S. benevolence.⁵ That U.S. colonization stood as an aberration in a Western colonial pattern otherwise marked by exploitation, subjugation, and oppression—as General Douglas MacArthur intoned in his Independence Day address—was reiterated by Roxas, who, in his own speech, claimed that U.S. colonization was so nobly and unselfishly accomplished that it had successfully turned the Philippines into the staging area for democracy in this part of the world.⁶ During the July 4 celebration, Americans and Filipinos projected an image of independence they wanted the world to see, created by the anti-imperial, global power of the United States.

The layers of colonial history on display at the Philippine Independence Day celebration were not simply about how the colonial past would be remembered in the Philippines or in the United States. Indeed, during Truman’s recorded address—broadcast in the Philippines as well as in twenty-five other countries around the globe—the U.S. president claimed that the United States’ great experiment in Pacific democracy had chartered a pattern of relationships for all the world to study.⁷ Philippine independence was historically significant, especially for Filipinos, who had lived for centuries under two imperial powers. But even as it shed its largest territorial possession in the Pacific, the United States was extending its power across the globe. And the U.S.-Philippine pattern of relationships was key to this extension of global power. The investment of U.S. policymakers, and Filipino elites such as Roxas, in defining and controlling the meaning of Philippine independence—and the relationship between the United States and the Philippines—reveals the entanglement of Philippine colonial history with the expansion of U.S. global power in the context of emerging Cold War global politics and the era of decolonization.⁸

Freedom Incorporated argues that the Philippines was the lynchpin in the construction of a decolonized U.S. empire and that anticommunist ideologies and political projects were critical pieces in the United States’ effort to expand imperial power in the age of decolonization. As a history of U.S. imperialism and anticommunism, this book details how, in the Philippines, the two became intertwined with U.S. political ideas about the colonial order and the place of the United States in it. Tracing the development and deployment of two specific operations of anticommunism—maintaining an ideology of imperial exceptionalism and repressing political dissent—this book details how Filipinos and their U.S. allies transformed local political struggles into sites of global communist revolution and international warfare. By linking political struggles over local resources and power in the Philippines to a global war against communism, U.S. and Filipino anticommunists legitimized the use of violence as a means to capture and contain the alternative forms of political, economic, and social organization as imagined by a diverse range of nonelite political actors. Both U.S. policymakers and Filipino elites promoted the Philippines as a testament to the United States’ benevolent policies toward colonialism and colonized people, and therefore it was a critical site for politicians of the two nations to demonstrate the successes of their ideological beliefs. Global anticommunism in the Philippines thus worked to affirm the processes of global decolonization while simultaneously containing challenges to colonial rule.

Because enemies of the Philippine Left used anticommunism as a way to discredit and marginalize challenges to elite rule, Filipino elites and their U.S. allies made U.S. imperial exceptionalism and anticommunist politics—two ideological formations that took shape in the colonial period—defining features of the postcolonial relationship between the two nations. From the early 1930s to the late 1950s, U.S. policymakers, state agents, and Filipino elites used anticommunist policies to quash leftist opposition locally and internationally and to explain how U.S. intervention could exist alongside Philippine independence. Inverting Vladimir Lenin’s linking of self-determination to anticolonialism, U.S. policymakers and Filipino elites insisted that an imperialistic, global communism threatened Philippine sovereignty, while the United States and its political allies in the Philippines stood for freedom and independence. Freedom Incorporated suggests that Americans and Filipinos used anticommunist politics to drive a stake through the radical anticolonial ideologies that located imperialism, capitalism, and racism as distinct projects of the West, including the United States.⁹ Furthermore, this book argues that understanding how the extension of U.S. power in the age of decolonization took shape requires returning to the colonial period in the Philippines, where, beginning in the late 1920s, anticommunist politics intersected with a U.S. discourse of imperial exceptionalism that depended on the Philippines’ role as a modern, model, postcolonial democracy on the global stage.

In placing the history of anticommunism in the Philippines within an imperial framework, this book reveals the function of anticommunist politics beyond just curtailing the popularity of communism in the nation or cultivating a particular kind of anticolonial nationalism, although anticommunist politics certainly aimed to achieve both goals. Freedom Incorporated traces a motley assemblage of U.S. and Filipino intelligence agents, military officials, paramilitaries, state bureaucrats, academics, and entrepreneurs who advanced U.S. imperial power by mobilizing anticommunist politics that disarticulated the United States from histories of empire, imperialism, and the colonial racial order.¹⁰ For U.S. policymakers, who, as one scholar recently noted, were more focused on the decline of Western colonialism and its inseparable features of racialism, white supremacy, and underdevelopment than on the Cold War conflict between superpowers, the U.S. relationship to the Philippines was an overture to decolonizing countries.¹¹

The Cold War and decolonization are undoubtedly interrelated temporally, and numerous studies of their intersection have complicated understandings of the Cold War and twentieth-century international history. However, the U.S. role in decolonization foregrounds Cold War geopolitics and, as a result, overlooks the history of U.S. empire in the Philippines.¹² In 1947, the term Cold War came into common use, and soon a second word, containment, revealed the spatial framework of U.S. global power.¹³ Yet Truman and his national security team quickly identified containment’s limits.¹⁴ In 1948, deciding that containing Communists’ territorial conquests was not enough, the newly created U.S. National Security Council (NSC) argued that defense of the Free World necessitated a set of policies and actions that would reduce the power and influence of the USSR [Union of Soviet Socialist Republics] to limits which no longer constitute a threat to peace.¹⁵ In diplomatic history, Truman’s decisions to provide aid to Greece and Turkey in 1947, the creation in 1949 of the Mutual Defense Assistance Program (MDAP), and the massive mobilization of military aid called for by the NCS in its 1950 report United States Objectives and Programs for National Security (known as NSC-68) characterize Americans’ ratcheting up of the conflict with the Soviets, the mission having changed from containment to rollback, and defense spending and military aid soared as U.S. policymakers decided to arm the free world.¹⁶ This most familiar guise of Cold War anticommunism—singularly shaped by the sense of a world split in two, in which global politics revolved around two centers of gravity—has been central to studies of U.S. Cold War interventions in decolonizing countries. In this conventional narrative, it is easy to interpret anticommunism as an unchanging and ready-made answer to any U.S. Cold War question. To be sure, the United States’ ideological battle with the Soviet Union was significant. Yet, as Prasenjit Duara has argued, understanding how the Cold War intersected with decolonization requires tracing a longer history of imperial relationships.¹⁷

Indeed, two polices that historians identify as the primary vehicles for the extension of anticommunist U.S. global power in the postwar era—aiding anticommunist forces in Greece and Turkey in 1947 and the burst of military spending and the fortification of U.S. military bases around the world that resulted from the acceptance of NSC-68 in 1950—had precursors in the Philippines. In fact, the first postwar U.S. military aid program was created for the Philippines in 1946. Shortly before the July 4, 1946, ceremony that marked the transfer of sovereignty from the United States to the independent Philippine Republic, Truman approved the Philippine Military Assistance Act, which provided for the transfer of $100 million worth of wartime munitions to the Philippine Republic and authorized the U.S. military to train the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) on terms consistent with military and naval requirements of the United States and with the national interest.¹⁸ U.S. policymakers transferred $100 million worth of military goods to the newly independent republic for two interconnected reasons: one, to ensure the permanent presence of the U.S. military on the islands and, two, to repress growing protests against the return of the colonial status quo in the Philippines. Intended to ensure the preservation of internal order in the Philippines, the 1946 Military Assistance Act was Washington weighing the political scales toward the Philippine political elite and their efforts to restore the prewar order.¹⁹

A year after the Military Assistance Act, the 1947 Military Bases Agreement gave the United States ninety-nine-year leases on twenty-three military installations carving into the sovereign Philippine territory. In a hearing on the bill, Vice Admiral Forrest Sherman argued that the Philippines was a keystone in the foundation of a base system essential to the security of the United States. The Philippine Military Assistance Act and the Military Bases Agreement clearly demonstrated that, despite U.S. claims otherwise, not only would the United States continue to assert its will over the islands’ internal political struggles, but the islands would serve as a key site for the exertion of U.S. military power in Asia and the Pacific.²⁰

The Philippines is not simply a case study for understanding the postwar expansion of U.S. global power, nor is this book a corrective to top-down histories that obscure the agency of non-Western individuals.²¹ Instead, focusing on the Philippines uncovers how anticommunist Filipinos, who believed that the postcolonial world would be marked by the interdependence of nations, sought to enact national policies to draw the island country closer to its former colonizer. Filipino elites, who had amassed both political and economic power in the colonial Philippines, imagined themselves to be part of an emerging postcolonial leadership and, in order to maintain their hold on power, fought to keep the colonial order intact in the independent Philippine Republic. They played important roles in constructing and promoting the sense that U.S. global power and the global war against communism were inherently anti-imperialist. Understanding how Filipino elites played key roles in constructing the space of global warfare makes for a sharper analysis of new racial formations—many of which cut across national lines and blurred older definitions of colonizer and colonized—as integral to the construction and maintenance of twentieth-century U.S. global power.²²

U.S. Imperial Exceptionalism

In 1906, George A. Malcolm, a twenty-five-year-old from a small town, graduated with a law degree from the University of Michigan and set out with determination to become a fledgling colonial officer in the faraway Philippines.²³ Initially, Malcolm worked in the Bureau of Health and the Bureau of Justice; in 1912, he helped establish and then became dean of the College of Law at the University of the Philippines, where the main office building in Manila still bears his name. In addition to serving in the colonial state and at the university, Malcolm authored a 763-page tome titled The Government of the Philippine Islands, published in 1916, and also textbooks on Philippine civics and constitutional law.²⁴ An appointee of Woodrow Wilson to the Philippine Supreme Court in 1917, Malcolm remained on the bench until the inauguration of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935, at which point he took a position as legal adviser to the U.S. high commissioner, the top U.S.-held position on the islands. From 1939 to 1943, Malcolm served as attorney general of Puerto Rico, another U.S. imperial site, but six years later he returned to teach legal and judicial ethics at the University of the Philippines.²⁵

Malcolm practiced what he considered to be efficient ways for managing dependent peoples in the Philippines, and from these experiences he extrapolated theories to apply to the broader colonial world. As both a scholar and a statesman, he was part of a cadre of men who translated their experiences in colonial administration into new realms of academic pursuit. Culling data from colonial sites, scholars from varied disciplinary backgrounds—from historians and economists to political scientists and ethnologists—cataloged peoples, environments, and terrains all in the name of improving colonial administration.²⁶ As is well documented, the expansion and consolidation of global empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depended on this production of knowledge as a mode of imperial power. The classification of colonial subjects into, for example, racial or tribal categories served both as the organizing principles for the daily ins and outs of colonial administration and as the building blocks for hierarchies of difference legitimating Anglo-European claims to civilizational superiority. On the global terrain of imperial cooperation and competition, colonial administration legitimated the rule of colonizer over colonized and the efforts of the architects and agents of empire to declare the superiority of one imperial nation over another.²⁷ During his thirty-year career in the Philippines, Malcolm—like others in the U.S. colonial service—was guided by William McKinley’s belief that Americans’ purpose was not to exploit, but to develop, to civilize, to educate, to train in the science of self-government.²⁸ Malcolm’s reflections on his own career in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, and his belief that his service demonstrated a resolute adherence to America’s revolutionary anti-colonial policy, demonstrate the pervasiveness and purpose of U.S. imperial exceptionalism.²⁹

Freedom Incorporated draws on the work of scholars who propose imperial exceptionalism as a fundamental feature in the exercise of imperial power. Claiming exceptionalism—to be different, to be exceptional—was a shared feature of imperial politics, and exceptionalist ideologies were, as Paul A. Kramer has argued, produced on imperial terrain.³⁰ Like the hierarchies of difference that organized and justified imperial rule, exceptionalist ideologies functioned as a mode of imperial power. Exceptionalist ideologies could also, importantly, serve to legitimate one empire’s form of rule over another’s. Illustrating just how unexceptional U.S. imperial policy was in the Philippines helps to explain why—even as the United States moved toward granting the Philippines independence during the 1930s—Americans continued to portray and even understand the United States’ version of imperialism as inherently different from that of its European counterparts, as anti-imperial even. In an examination of the transformation in the U.S.-Philippine relationship from the early 1930s to the late 1950s, the discursive and structural components of U.S. imperial power come into view in concrete ways. The point here is not to draw out the historic differences between the United States and other imperial powers in Southeast Asia; rather, it is to analyze and elucidate how claims of U.S. imperial exceptionalism changed as the Philippines transitioned from colony to independent republic and as anticolonial movements gained steam through the early Cold War period.

Despite the title of Malcolm’s 1957 memoir—American Colonial Careerist—and a belief that Americans and Britons shared an Anglo-Saxon culture that uniquely suited them to imperialism’s civilizing mission, Malcolm did not believe that the United States was part of the imperial world order. His 1906 arrival in the Philippines occurred, as he described it, at the heyday of Imperialism when European powers ruled colonies covering half the globe. The colonization of the Philippines was decidedly not a part of this history.³¹ To Malcolm, U.S. control of the Philippines was a relationship of support rather than one of imperial domination, one that was instructive, not oppressive.³² Despite the destructive racial and civilizational hierarchies that underpinned these rationalizations, and that enabled Malcolm to forge a career in the American equivalent to what other empires called the ‘Colonial Service,’ Malcolm believed the United States was an empire only in that it was guided by the noble aspirations of liberty and justice for all.³³ In American Colonial Careerist, written in the midst of the Cold War and wars of decolonization, Malcolm offered a version of colonial history that dovetailed with the views of U.S. foreign policymakers in the Philippines: that U.S. colonial tutelage had successfully produced a shining example of colonial rule and a model of peaceful decolonization in Southeast Asia.

However, ideologies of U.S. imperial exceptionalism produced and disseminated by the architects and agents of empire did not go unchallenged.³⁴ Following World War I (WWI), Leninist and Wilsonian ideas about nationalism, imperialism, and self-determination galvanized anticolonial movements.³⁵ Marxist- and Leninist-inspired anticolonial movements, in particular, forced U.S. policymakers to grapple with what the conquest of the Philippines meant for the United States’ place in the colonial racial order, as well as in the global imperial one. Americans’ own racialized and classed conceptions of Filipinos’ perceived lack of political capacity seemed to legitimate colonial rule, but exempting the United States from colonialism’s global color line was a difficult feat. Despite long-standing exceptionalist beliefs shared by U.S. colonial officials such as Malcolm, a radical anti-imperial movement—one that countered notions that the United States acted as an anti-imperial force for good in the world—did emerge in the Philippines. In fact, in his position on the Supreme Court, Malcolm confronted the challenge of Philippine radical anticolonialism when, in 1932, he ruled to outlaw the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP), or Philippine Communist Party.³⁶ As global imperial policies shifted from increased self-governance and colonial development projects in the interwar period to outright wars for independence in the postwar era, U.S. imperial formations adapted as well. Following World War II (WWII), the contradiction between the rhetoric of U.S. exceptionalism—the idea that the United States was an inherently anti-imperial nation—and reality sharpened as the United States expanded its military and political influence globally and sided with European empires in the face of anticolonial conflicts.

As a history of U.S. imperialism in transition, this book is a story of asymmetrical power. This imperial relationship shapes the archive; reflecting on the relationship across power, archives, and the writing of imperial histories, anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler observes, Transparency is not what archival collections are known for.³⁷ This is particularly true when it comes to topics that fall under the broad rubric of national security issues, as the concerns in this book overwhelmingly do.³⁸ That said, U.S. government records remain the disproportionate source of material for this study, a reflection itself of the uneven power between the two nations. And though documents collected by U.S. authorities, particularly during the wartime and immediate postwar years, provide an entry into the perspectives and motivations of well-known groups—for example, the Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon (Peoples’ Army against the Japanese), known as the Hukbalahaps, or Huks—gaining access to the Philippine side of this story has been a consistent challenge.³⁹ The structural imbalance between the United States and the Philippines also shaped the terrain of possibilities on which Filipino elites could maneuver; yet, despite the unevenness, U.S. policymakers’ commitment to the strategic and symbolic significance of the Philippines created an environment in which Filipinos could exert more agency than might be expected. In Freedom Incorporated, elite Filipinos play an important role: driving the anticommunist campaign against the Huks, leveraging the symbolic and strategic role of the Philippines to gain disbursements of U.S. military and development aid, and testifying on the global stage that the United States had inaugurated decolonization by setting the Philippines free.⁴⁰ Thus the voices and actions of elite Filipinos are crucial to this history despite the overwhelming power possessed by the United States vis-à-vis the islands.

Empire and Anticommunism

Throughout the twentieth century, U.S. actors including politicians continually espoused exceptional ideas and, in doing so, contributed to the erasure of U.S. imperial history. Primary sources that continue to inform historical work are littered with examples of imperial exceptionalism, although these are seldom detected. Relying on materials of high-profile anticommunist events in the United States, such as the 1930 U.S. House of Representatives Special Committee to Investigate Communist Activities in the United States hearings, also known as the Fish Committee hearings, has likely led many historians of U.S. anticommunism to conclude that U.S. politicians cared little about anticommunism in the U.S. colony. Yet, analyzing the proceedings of the Fish Committee in the context of U.S. exceptionalism and imperial history helps show that anticommunist politics worked in tandem with the notion that the United States was an exceptional colonial power. By neglecting to connect U.S. colonial history in the Philippines with a wider history of anticommunism in the colonial world, and therefore ignoring the ways imperialism has shaped U.S. culture and politics—including the way that U.S. political leaders thought about colonialism and the Philippines—historians, intentionally or not, have reinforced the ideology of U.S. imperial exceptionalism.⁴¹ Moreover, attending to both interwar and postwar U.S. imperial history helps lend nuance to understandings of U.S. anticommunism that have focused primarily on the development of domestic laws, networks, and institutions.⁴²

Historians’ endeavors to highlight continuity across pre-and post-WWII antisubversive politics by uncovering state-level anticommunist policies have tended to connect the first Red Scare of 1917–1920 to the Cold War; because of that, they have reconstructed the networks of local anticommunist political actors and institutions in the 1920s and 1930s that fueled broader Cold War anticommunist politics. But even this work has all too often ignored U.S. imperial history and viewed anticommunism as a response to local conditions rather than as a facet of the politics of U.S. imperial power.⁴³ Moreover, despite the recent growth in literature on the colonial Philippines, histories of U.S. imperialism and U.S. anticommunism have continued to flow in relatively separate historiographical streams. Though historians of the Cold War have begun to bridge the two, few scholars examine the connections between U.S. anticommunism and U.S. rule in the colonial Philippines, viewing the first as a domestic project and the second in terms of foreign policy. This separation is particularly striking in light of historians’ increased interest in transnational history.⁴⁴

This problem is not simply the product of historians choosing to focus solely on histories within the continental United States.⁴⁵ Although historians have emphasized the ways that anticommunism did not simply equate to an anti-Soviet position but instead encompassed a much broader range of political positions, the divide between the foreign and the domestic has remained firmly entrenched in the literature on interwar U.S. anticommunism.⁴⁶ Although a rich body of scholarship has revealed the breadth and diversity of anticommunist politics—emphasizing the flexibility of this discourse that, as historian Landon R. Y. Storrs has argued, historical actors employed at various places and moments in defense of class, religious, and racial hierarchies—it has nonetheless also overlooked the imperial dimensions of U.S. society.⁴⁷ As a result, the ways that imperial encounters have shaped historical actors’ sense of social relations—ranging from race and gender to labor and conceptions of civilizations—remain unexamined. Moreover, while historians of the Cold War have emphasized the importance of anticolonial rhetoric in the United States’ ideological battle with the Soviet Union, less attention has been paid to how central the colonial relationship to the Philippines was for U.S. policymakers who sought to win the favor of anticolonial nationalists in Southeast Asia.

The role of the United States, usually considered a latecomer to the imperial game and frequently characterized as an aberrant empire that ceded territorial control for economic hegemony, is often refracted through the lens of the Cold War, thus obscuring its imperial history of the pre- and postwar eras. This is not to suggest that U.S. imperialism was not different from European variants; however, as numerous comparative studies of European imperialism have detailed, imperial power and colonial rule qualitatively differed between imperial powers and even across imperial sites of the same empire. Like other colonial powers in the region, the U.S. colonial state in the Philippines repressed communism as well as other radical labor and anticolonial movements through increased policing, mass imprisonment, and the criminalization of party-based communist politics.

As home to many U.S. military installations, the Philippines was a strategically critical site for expanding and maintaining U.S. power in Asia, and thus geopolitical considerations explain one reason why U.S. policymakers committed this military assistance. But U.S. policymakers also made these decisions because they believed in the symbolic import of the model colony to shape, positively or negatively, the U.S. relationship to the Afro-Asian bloc during the Cold War. Both U.S. and Filipino anticommunists believed in the centrality of the Philippines in the fight against communism; as the first president of the independent republic, Manuel Roxas, put it, the Philippines was the staging area for democracy in the Far East, the model of enlightened colonial and postcolonial policy.⁴⁸ And, in the context of the Cold War and decolonization, U.S. and Filipino elites’ exceptionalist commitment to conceiving the Philippines as a model colony enabled the use of violence against Philippine civilians in the name of anticommunism.

To be sure, both U.S. and Philippine politicians believed that communism posed a threat to the way of life in their respective countries. Moreover, although anticommunists tended to view discrete and disparate progressive and reform movements as communistic, there also were self-described communist individuals and groups in the Philippines who truly believed that the USSR represented the best example of a just society and welcomed Soviet assistance. But during the 1930s and the immediate post-WWII years, those who identified as communist or Marxist tended to focus on organizing for social reforms, such as giving tenants an equitable share in the harvest; indeed, the vast majority of individual Communists advocated for reforming the political system, not overthrowing it.⁴⁹ However, as a tactic in their larger fight against communism, Filipino and U.S. anticommunists branded dissent as subversion, repressed alternative visions for the postindependence Philippine political and economic order, and strengthened the elite political class’s political hold.⁵⁰ Furthermore, by wedding anticommunist politics and violence to concepts of economic security and freedom, anticommunists worked to consolidate a particular definition of political independence in the Philippines, one that was divorced from economic equality either among nations or within nations and that Washington policymakers and their anticommunist allies would go on to use throughout the Cold War.

Because most histories of U.S. engagement with global decolonization efforts proffer a teleological narrative of sovereignty and independence that invariably begins after WWII—a periodization that also aligns with Philippine independence—accounts of the United States’ role in decolonization usually ignore U.S. empire in Southeast Asia. As a consequence, continuities between U.S. imperial power across the traditional pre- and post-1945 division fall from view. This is not to say that anticommunist politics crafted in the colonial period were deployed unchanged after 1945 or that the roots of anticommunist U.S. foreign policy lay solely in the Philippines. Instead, it is to say that colonization and decolonization in the Philippines—including the development and deployment of anticommunist politics—shaped U.S. responses to decolonization more broadly. The intention of this book is not to emphasize colonial-postcolonial continuities, but rather to illuminate the legacies and adaptations of U.S. imperial power—by tracing anticommunist politics—during moments of profound local, regional, and global transitions.⁵¹

Freedom Incorporated

In June 1953, Edward Lansdale of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) boarded a plane at Clark Air Force Base, the sprawling, 130,000-acre U.S. military installation located just north of Manila. Three years before, agent Lansdale had traveled to the Philippines to advise Ramón Magsaysay, the Philippine secretary of national defense and head of the nation’s armed forces, on issues of internal security. From 1950 to 1953, Lansdale, flush with U.S. funding, helped the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) in its war to eradicate the Huks. Formed in 1942, after the Japanese invasion and occupation of the Philippines, and largely made up of peasant union members, the Huks spent the years of WWII believing they were part of a global struggle against fascism. Citing a profound faith in the four freedoms proclaimed in the Atlantic Charter, the Huks believed their wartime contributions would enable them to bargain for better living conditions for the peasants and laborers at the end of the war.⁵² Instead, Americans and Filipinos, both eager to restore the prewar social and political order in advance of Philippine independence, cast the Huks as communist revolutionaries who plotted to overthrow the Philippine state. By 1953, however, as Lansdale was leaving the islands, the nearly seven-year-long campaign against the Huks was finally coming to an end. The campaign was celebrated in the U.S. press as the first victory over Asian communism, and U.S. and Filipino policymakers—including Lansdale—believed that they had created a universally applicable model for successful anticommunist warfare. When Lansdale got off the plane, he was in Saigon. And within a year, he would bring the Freedom Company, a CIA-funded Filipino paramilitary organization, and with it the strategy of the Huk campaign—all-out friendship or all-out force—to the war of decolonization in Vietnam.⁵³

Ten years later, in the summer of 1964, before the United States sent its first ground troops into Vietnam, Lansdale reiterated the importance of the Philippine